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TOURISM. Food has always been a component of tourism. As a physical necessity and as a prominent arena for expressing creativity and for embodying cultural and individual identity, food has functioned as destination, venue, and vehicle for tourism. As destination, food is the primary experience sought. The preparation, consumption, and even the viewing of a foreign dish gives the tourist a sense of otherness and the exotic. As vehicle, food offers an entry point for viewing another culture. The sensory attributes of food enable consumers to feel a deeper level of experiencing; by ingesting food representing another culture, they can feel that they ingest that culture. As venue, food offers a site from which a culture can be explored. These aspects can be commercial or domestic, public or private, festive or ordinary. Restaurants, festivals, cookbooks, grocery stores, private festive food events, cooking classes, cooking shows, advertising, literature, films, tourism brochures, food tours, and other such sites are physical loci for experiencing tourism. They also offer a tangible, knowable base from which other facets of culture—history, religion, artistic traditions, customs—can be understood and experienced.

Tourism is generally thought of as an activity in which individuals explore a culture that is foreign to them. Valene Smith defines a tourist as "a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change" (Hosts and Guests, p. 1). The theme of tourism as spiritual and emotional quest appears frequently in scholarly works. Dean MacCannell sees tourism as a modern phenomenon in which tourists are on a quest to recover lost authenticity: it offers a way for modern man to explore the "real life" of others (A New Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 91). Mark Neumann suggests that "tourism is a metaphor for our struggle to make sense of our self and world within a highly differentiated culture" ("Wandering Through the Museum: Experience and Identity in a Spectator Culture," p. 22). Most scholars of tourism now see tourism both as a state of mind in which anything, including the everyday and the local, can be subjected to the "tourist gaze"—to borrow John Urry's book title—and as a continuum of types of experiences involving otherness. Erik Cohen offers a typology of tourists based on their concept and concern with authenticity: existential, experimental, experiential, recreational, and diversionary tourists ("Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism"). Valene Smith, in Going Places, outlines a typology of tourists based on aspects of culture being explored and on the motivations of the tourist: ethnic, cultural, historical, environmental, recreational. Maxine Feifer adds the "post-tourist" who sees tourism as a game and inherently inauthentic in its experiencing of another culture.

Culinary tourism is a theoretical framework for analyzing the role of food in tourism. It refers to the "intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an Other." It is voluntary and consciously contains an element of curiosity—that is, people eating out of choice, not only physical need.

The term "foodways" involves all the other aspects of food, referring to the network of activities and systems—physical, social, communicative, cultural, economic, spiritual, and aesthetic—surrounding the product itself: procurement, preparation, preservation, presentation, consumption, clean-up, and conceptualization. In this sense, culinary tourism can occur in any aspect of foodways, from purchasing familiar ingredients from a new grocery store to adding exotic ingredients to a familiar recipe. It can also include behaviors connected to thinking and talking about food: collecting recipes, watching televised cooking shows or films incorporating food, conversing about restaurants, reading cookbooks and food columns, reminiscing about food experiences.

The culinary Other is simply anything different from the known and familiar. It can be broken into six overlapping categories. National or cultural identity is the most commonly perceived category and includes "ethnic" foods as well as "foreign" foods. Foods become a cultural Other by being placed in a context in which they are different. Thus, kimchi is standard fare in Korea, but is ethnic and foreign in the United States.

Region is the second category of Other and refers to groupings within a culture, differentiated by geographic location and physical resources. Within the United States, regional foods from areas such as the South (grits, fried chicken, hominy, corn bread), New England (baked beans, lobster, boiled suppers), the Southwest (chili peppers, Mexican-based foods), the Mid-Atlantic states (crab and seafood), and even the Midwest (meatloaf, mashed potatoes); and from specific cities, such as New Orleans (gumbo, jambalaya), Kansas City and Memphis (barbecue), and San Francisco (nouvelle cuisine) are advertised as culinary Others appropriate for tourism.

Time as Other refers to both past and future. Foods from the past are commonly found in museums, reenactment events, and cookbooks, and are used as a way of touring a historical era. Similarly, visions of the future can be translated into foodways—astronaut foods, freeze-dried ice cream, foods compressed into pills and vitamins. Ethos and religion as Other offer foods representing different or novel worldviews and value systems. Religions specifying food taboos or guidelines, such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, can be explored as tourism by experiencing their foodways. Vegetarian foods—textured protein, veggie burgers, and foods commonly used in the United States as meat substitutes, such as bean curd and tempeh—are frequently tried out of curiosity rather than ethical belief.

Socioeconomic class is another category of Other. Gourmet foods, fine wine, and expensive restaurants are associated with the upper class, and individuals can get a taste of that lifestyle through these foodways. Conversely, foods associated with lower classes—white bread and bologna sandwiches, junk foods, processed "cheese food," opossum meat or roadkill, meager portions—can be tried in order "to see how the other half lives."

Gender represents the final Other. Although strict taboos do not exist in the United States, there are certain foods associated with each gender: women eat salads, "light" foods, poultry and fish, dainty portions; men eat red meat, large portions, hearty foods. By trying the foods associated with another gender, an individual can try out that identity.

Culinary tourism involves three realms or continua of experience: the exotic, the edible, and the palatable. Based on the perceptions of consumers, the exotic ranges from those food experiences that are familiar and commonplace to those that are strange, new, and different. The edible-to-inedible continuum represents concepts of which items are physically, conceptually, and morally possible for ingestion. These concepts are culturally constructed but also draw upon the consumer's personal ethos. Palatable refers to pleasant and satisfying tastes, and represents individual preferences as well as social trends identifying desirable foods and designating their symbolic associations. Since the placement of foods and food experiences within these continua is a matter of perception and experience, this placement can shift over time or place and between individuals. Foods, therefore, that are perceived as appropriate for culinary tourism can become mundane and familiar, and then may be eaten out of hunger or taste preference rather than curiosity. For example, in the United States, foods that were recently touristic but have become standard fare in many American diets include Japanese sushi; Thai noodles with peanut sauce; Chinese chop suey, chow mein, and egg rolls; Mexican tacos and burritos; and Middle Eastern pita. These and other foods range in the extent of their adaptation to American tastes and resources. As these foods become more familiar, those eaters seeking more touristic experiences tend to seek more authenticity and depth of understanding of a foreign cuisine.

Food will be a part of tourism as long as people are curious about the world around them, but both are multivocal and multivalent domains of activity. And it is important to remember that although foodways can offer an entry into another realm of Other, culinary tourism is frequently not as much a window into other cultures as a mirror on our own.

See also Comfort Food; Gender and Food; Travel; United States: Ethnic Cuisines.

Lucy M. Long